Author: Prem Shankar Jha
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: October 5, 2001
Introduction: The West's amnesia
towards Pakistan defies belief
Since September 11, the US has been
in a dilemma between two kinds of response to the threat posed by international
terrorism. Bush is under political pressure to extract vengeance and find
a 'quick fix' solution. That pressure has made him focus relentlessly on
Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban.
Professionals are unanimous that
the fight against terrorism cannot be fought against one person, one organisation
or in one country. Terrorists have no State, but belong to networks that
are interlocked, porous and spread across many countries. They can only
be fought by creating an opposing network of the intelligence agencies
and military assets of all States that are, or could be, threatened by
terrorists; by identifying and destroying terrorist nodes, and breaking
the links that join them.
The speeches of Colin Powell, General
Shelton and others have reflected this growing awareness, but as of today
the conflict between the two alternative strategies remains unresolved.
And that conflict is once more resulting in American actions that threaten
to drive a wedge between the US and India. The wedge is taking the form
of a revival of military and economic relations between the US and Pakistan.
It's a dizzyingly rapid rehabilitation of Pakistan from the nether zones
of a failing near-terrorist State to a darling of the western alliance
in this new 'war' against terrorism!
Within the space of two weeks, the
US has gone back on an earlier decision to lift post-Pokhran sanctions
on only India and has lifted them on both India and Pakistan. It has also
piloted the rescheduling (and thereby partial write-off) of
$ 30 billion of Pakistan's debt.
Equally significant is the sudden love affair of the European Union with
Pakistan. Musharraf's promise of wholehearted support of the US against
Afghanistan was followed by the descent on Islamabad of high level EU dignitaries,
who went away utterly charmed and had no difficulty in agreeing to rescheduling
Pakistan's debt.
Musharraf's response to these huge
concessions could hardly have given American and European policy makers
any comfort. He soon announced that his government will not break its diplomatic
ties with the Taliban. His foreign minister warned other nations, that
is, Russia, the CIS States and the US, not to support the Northern Alliance.
Musharraf also said that Pakistan would not allow its bases to be used
by the US for any attack on Afghanistan.
But all this has not yet given rise
to any second thoughts in Washington or the EU capitals. Only hours after
Pakistan's spate of announcements, the US agreed to supply it with military
hardware and sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment. Powell has
offered Pakistan helicopter gunships to patrol the Afghan border. This
has been followed by the proposed visit of Tony Blair to Islamabad reportedly
on Friday.
Believe it or not, Blair is going
to discuss ways to bridge the gap between Pakistan and the Northern Alliance
in the fight against the Taliban. Blair seems to have conveniently forgotten
that between 100,000 and 150,000 Pakistanis have spent the last decade
fighting with the Taliban against the alliance.
To Indians, this is like revisiting
a nightmare. Although so far the US has promised only $ 50 million worth
of military equipment, few of India's policy makers have forgotten that
military aid to Pakistan under the Baghdad Pact also started with a mere
$ 50 million in 1955. By the time Pakistan decided to use American hardware
to launch the 1965 war, this aid had exceeded a billion dollars. Powell's
offer of helicopter gunships suggests that the process of inflation has
begun. There are no prizes for guessing which border they will monitor.
Blair's visit to Pakistan is also
a part of the nightmare. Few Indians have forgotten that no country worked
harder in 1948 to convince the Security Council members in New York and
the American state department in Washington to ignore the Instrument of
Accession, turn a blind eye to Pakistan's brazen military grab at Kashmir,
and force India to accept a resolution that put it on a legal and moral
par with Pakistan in the search for a solution in Kashmir. Britain's sudden
re-entry in South Asia will reinforce Musharraf's bid to make the West
turn a blind eye to the jehadis in Kashmir on the grounds that this is
'a struggle for independence'.
For India, most ominous of all is
the West's silence after Musharraf's warning that the so-called jehad in
Kashmir is not terrorism. Not only did this not bring any denial from Washington,
but the issue was evaded by American ambassador Robert Blackwill in a TV
interview on Star TV. The silence has endured even after the calculated
two-week lull in Lashkar and Jaish activities in Kashmir was broken by
two fidayeen attacks on Sunday and Monday that killed not only five soldiers,
several CRPF men, and five Kashmiri policemen, but more than 20 Kashmiri
civilians.
How this, or the deaths at the hands
of 'insurgents' of more than 9,800 civilians over the last 11 years, squares
with the notion of a struggle for independence, or with the explicit description
of terrorism by the US and UN as attacks on civilians, remains utterly
obscure.
The self-serving amnesia of the
West towards Pakistan defies belief. If the war against terrorism requires
cooperation between a large number of States to build an intelligence and
military 'counter-network', then this cooperation must be voluntary. In
Pakistan's case alone, it had to be purchased.
In Pakistan's case, it could easily
be counterproductive. Intelligence acquired through such cooperation is
likely to be flawed and information of joint actions planned with such
a partner is likely to be leaked to the opponent. Surely, the state department
could not have forgotten that Ramzi Youssef evaded three traps set for
him by the Pakistani police and FBI because he had been tipped off in advance.
Who tipped off Osama in 1998 when the Americans could bomb only empty camps?
Washington has also forgotten that
2001 is not 1980. In 1980, Pakistan suffered from no conflict of interest
because the interests of the Afghan Mujahideen, the US, and its own, were
in perfect alignment. That alignment was destroyed not on September 11,
but eight years earlier when one bunch of Deobandi Islamic zealots trained
in Pakistani madrasas and owing allegiance to Pakistani political parties
turned their guns on America while another turned them on Kashmir and India.
Ramzi Youssef, who made the first
attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, the assassin of two
CIA operatives in Langley, the five terrorists who almost blew up 10 United
Airlines jets in the far east in 1994, and the Dar-es Salaam and Nairobi
bombers of 1998, all had return air tickets to Karachi, presumably en route
to Peshawar. The last bombing was unequivocally traced to Osama.
The same terrorist network has spread
seamlessly into Kashmir. On May 27 and 28, 1999, the Daily Telegraph and
the Independent of London, carried stories they attributed to "western
intelligence sources" to the effect that a loose international network
coordinated by Pakistan's ISI, embracing a wide range of terrorist organisations
from Algeria to Egypt to central Asia and Afghanistan, was behind the Pakistani
incursion into Kargil.
When banned by the US for its links
with Bin Laden, the Harkat-ul-Ansar resurfaced as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.
Following September 11, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen has merged seamlessly
into the Jaish-e-Mohammed. The Jaish is part of a four organisation jehadi
network that calls itself the 'Army of Islam', and contains the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba,
the Al Badr Mujahideen and the Harkat-ul Mujahideen. This 'army' is connected
to Bin Laden's Al Qaeda and the ISI.
All this makes it impossible for
Pakistan to give its support to the West without giving up the jehad in
Kashmir and running the risk of a 'jehad against itself' within Pakistan.
The West will learn this soon but by then it will have invested too much
in the Pakistan connection and too many careers will be at stake for it
to admit its mistake and change tack.
